Cloning Win10 from MBP 15" (2017) X5 thunderbolt disk (4K sector size) to USB SATA SSD (512b sector size) not working

Hi everybody
I have problem cloning Win10 from new hardware to use it on old one.
MacBook Pro 15" (2017 & Catalina) with external Samsung X5 thunderbolt 3 disk (4K sector size) installed Win10. Trying to clone Win disk on Samsung EVO 500 (USB case) to use the same installation and data on my old Mac Pro 5.1 (2012).

  1. Imaging for X5 goes without complains and when I try to reverse process back to X5 it works fine. So wim image is file based (because of different sector size) and OK!
  2. When I apply this image to SAMSUNG EVO 500 USB Winclone doesn’t complain either and everything looks OK. But, I can’t start to boot from this disk and also I can’t use it for VMware to sysprep. When trying to directly boot from disk I got error “Can’t find OS disk…bla bla…press CTRL-ALT-DEL”. When I try to inject it to VMWare Fusion it told me that can’t use this disk to boot. Booting Mac with option key show this disk as one with OS installed and also I can see it in “startup disk list” in Mojave but not in Catalina.

Any idea what I am doing wrong and how to clone 4K sector disk to 512b sector disk? As I see everybody using 512b to 4K cloning (old to new machine) through image but I need opposite direction cloning. :slight_smile:

Ideas?

External booting can result in this behavior. It seems like you are doing the right things. The Mac firmware may not support it.

tim